Alexandra Maria Lara

Alexandra Maria Lara

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Birth name: Alexandra Maria Platareanu
Date of birth: 12 November 1978
Place of birth: Bucharest, Romania
Nickname: Alexa
Height: 5′ 8½” (1.74 m)

Famous Quote: “No matter what happens to me and my career in the future, Berlin is always going to be my hometown. I early acquired adulthood through my job. If I would have written a wish list to Santa Claus sometime, with wishes for my career to film with Coppola, I would’ve never arrogated that to myself.”

Contact Address and Autograph: Addresses and fan mail information

Alexandra Maria Lara
Players Agentur Management GmbH
Sophienstrasse 21
10178 Berlin – Mitte, Germany 

Biography: Alexandra Maria Lara (born Alexandra Plătăreanu on November 12, 1978) is a German actress. She performs predominantly in leading roles in a variety of historical and crime films. Lara is best known for her roles in Control (2007), Der Tunnel (2001), Nackt (2002), Downfall (2004), and About the Looking for and the Finding of Love (2005). With delicately chiseled Eastern European features and a lithe, graceful presence, Romanian-born actress Alexandra Maria Lara evinced professional qualities that promised to set her apart from her contemporaries. 

She launched her career rather nonchalantly, with roles that confined her to her native continent films such as the 2001 satire Südsee, eigene Insel and the 2002 psychological drama Fisimatenten that generally failed to traverse the Atlantic. Lara expanded her scope, however, via two key crossover roles, both portrayals of historic figures that played largely off of the thespian’s classical look: that of Countess Maria Walewska in Yves Simoneau’s 2002 epic telemovie Napoleon (about the titular French ruler) and that of Traudl Junge, a young housekeeper who bears witness to Adolf Hitler’s decline, in the superior period drama Downfall (2004). International audiences next caught Lara via a small supporting role in Control (2007), director Anton Corbijn’s much anticipated biopic of post-punk singer Ian Curtis.

Born in Bucharest, Lara is the only child of Valentin Plătăreanu, a Bucharest actor, and his wife, Doina, a homemaker. At the age of four (in 1983) her family decided to flee to West Germany to escape from the Nicolae Ceauşescu regime in Communist Romania. Although the family had originally planned to emigrate to Canada, they settled down in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, before eventually moving to Berlin.

After graduating at the Französisches Gymnasium Berlin in 1997, Lara went on studying acting under the management of her father, co-founder of the Theaterwerkstatt Charlottenburg, until 2000. By the age of 16 she was already playing lead roles in various television dramas. Since then her career has developed and she has become a respected film actress. Her most famous role to date, which has resulted in international recognition, is as Traudl Junge, Adolf Hitler’s secretary in the Oscar Nominated 2004 film Der Untergang.

Due to her convincing performance in Der Untergang, Francis Ford Coppola wrote her a letter and gave her a leading role in Youth Without Youth (2007). She plays a lead role in Greek director Theo Angelopoulos’s 2007 film The Dust of Time, opposite Harvey Keitel and Bruno Ganz. Also in 2007, she appeared as journalist Annik Honoré in the film Control, the Ian Curtis biopic.

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